209:, known for his art depicting the American west and Southwestern United States, grew up reading natural history and honed his artistic skills drawing wildlife in West Virginia. When the essay was written, Leigh was a contract artist for popular magazines. Unlike his previous work with writers, Leigh collaborated with Wells in coming up with the design of the Martian landscape, civilization, and creatures which could conceivably inhabit the planet. Historian Jennifer Tucker notes that Leigh's illustrations reflect a "sophisticated and innovative use of line and space, associated with new graphic design concepts in the early 1900s" with a "nod to modern symbols big and small", from the "iconography of world's fairs, monuments, and exhibitions to the fashionable dress and headband of the 'flapper' Martian girl". Leigh's images, Tucker writes, belong to the then nascent "visual genre of
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engineering science to make canals beside which our greatest human achievements pale into insignificance." The many unanswered questions about these purported
Martians led Wells to compose an essay to explore and take an "imaginative flight" into the speculative natural history of Mars, with descriptions of all its flora and fauna, and depictions of the Martians themselves.
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created by an advanced civilization on Mars, an idea that Wells found compelling, but was dismissed by the astronomical community as a fantasy. Lowell's claims convinced Wells of not just the habitability of Mars, but also for the idea that "it is inhabited by creatures of sufficient energy and
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Wells tackles the speculative theory of life on Mars in a nine page essay, with four pages devoted to illustrations by
William Robinson Leigh and five pages of prose split into a brief introduction and background to the subject, followed by eight sections: "Does life exist on Mars?", "Probable
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225:"There are certain features in which they are likely to resemble us. And as likely as not they will be covered with feathers or fur. It is no less reasonable to suppose, instead of a hand, a group of tentacles or proboscis-like organs"
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Wells originally pursued his initial line of inquiry into the types of possible life that might be found on Mars while developing a science fiction story in the mid-1890s that would later become the novel
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Appearance of the
Martian Flora", "The Animal Kingdom", "No Fish on the Planet", "Climatic Conditions", "The Ruling Inhabitants", "How Like Terrestrial Humanity?", and "Martian Civilizations".
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describing the 1907 Lowell expedition to Chile, an attempt to capture images of the purported
Martian canals. Lowell's canals were later discredited and explained as an
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261:"Conditions on Mars are such that the inhabitants could utilize the direct energy of the sun's rays to drive machinery for filling the canals"
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Brown, Michael (2005). "Phenomenology and
Historical Research". In Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Gretchen Barbatsis, and Keith Kenney (ed.)
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Poulos, James (2018). "For the Love of Mars: Why settling the red planet can lift us from our antihuman malaise". In Stuart Clark (ed.)
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237:"A jungle of big, slender, stalky, lax-textured, flood-fed plants with a sort of insect life fluttering amidst the vegetation"
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Wells, H. G. & Leigh, W. R. (March 1908). "The Things that Live on Mars".
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in
Arizona, captured the imagination of Wells, particularly his book
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Crossley 2011 pp. 126-128; Brown 2005, pp. 315-326; Poulos 2018.
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Nature
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420:(2011). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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466:(2022). Bloomsbury Publishing.
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